I hated ACDSee after version 2 because it took it 2 hours just to open up. However, when I bought my camera that took RAW photos I found out ACDSee couldn’t render them (now, with version 9 it can) and I had to go through the Bridge or Photoshop just to browse an album. A friend recommended Fast Stone Image Viewer, which convinced me in uninstalling ACDsee in 5 minutes after using it. Here I won’t go into specifying its functionalities, but I’ll let the curious check out the numerous features for themselves. The software is free!

Download Fast Stone Image Viewer: [link]
ps. Don’t be afraid of the beta


I knew for some time now that my monitor is not calibrated right. For some reason even with the sample calibration instructions I had the monitor either too bright, or too dark.
Now I got this program 'WiziWYG XP', which miraculously fixed everything with calibration while I got an instant feedback from the screen. It even added a colour profile in Photoshop so now I work in same colour space everywhere.

Download WiziWYG XP: [link]


Member Of

If you're old school you need this: [link]

I thought that I should write about great free software a friend showed me lately. It's called FastStone ImageViewer and it's a image viewer (duh)
I found it quite faster than ACDsee 7/8, but more importantly it opens my RAW (Canon 350D) images which no other image viewer did... I mean before that I had to open Photoshop or the featureless Canon EXBrowser in order just to see my pics. Other than that I found that it's a pleasure to work in it since in full screen you're given all options/features of the windowed look - just move across all screen borders to check it out.
So check it out:
[link]

ps. check out the skins, and play around with the settings

Hey guys, it’s been a long time since my last journal. That’s because I'm not the type of guy that would write journals on a constant basis and for that reason I would like to make one that would stand till the next time I write.
Well, on my programme for the following period is getting my Masters Thesis complete as best as I can. The project itself is pretty huge, and I’m having trouble of keeping schedule. The whining stops here!

Now, regarding photography…
Since I consider myself a beginner in photography, I do a lot of reading… and since I found a lot of interesting stuff lately I would like to share it with you. Namely, I gathered a bunch of links that I consider them to be very useful to any photographer since they present a lot of useful methods/techniques such that even pros can learn something (even if it it’s only a Photoshop shortcut )

[link] - Great online book about editing photos with Photoshop. Very useful, with hands-on examples.

[link] - I came across this character on many occasions, in many books. Well he gives a lot of interesting tricks in his rather large videos, which require you to have a broadband link in order to DL them. His techniques for RAW workflow are quite good. Besides photo editing, he presents some design techniques.

[link] - “By acquiring two digital images of a scene, one with flash and one without flash, we let the user subsequently interpolate the images to obtain any continuous flash intensity, and even extrapolate beyond the original images”. This was the description from the site. Download the demo and you’ll be surprised of the output. Note: Requires .Net Framework to be installed.


BTW recently I found out that people are not notified it you edit a photo and resend it. This was the case with [link] , where I had a totally revamped photo and nobody noticed the difference – how could they if nobody was notified. Keep this in mind when updating photos!

Till next time… Bye!

I would like to share with you that this DA has become a part of morning habit. My day starts by brewing some coffee and drinking it while surfing DA. Which I`m doing right now...

Now, I would like to go on elaborating, however I have to go to classes. Perhaps then I`ll modify this journal later.